User blog:Styracosaurus Rider/Jurassic Park Wiki 2014 - The Reboot
='OUTDATED'= With Jurassic World hitting theaters in 2015, this wiki will definitely be getting a big boost in visitor traffic as we approach the release date. Because of this, the other admins and I have seen this as an opportunity to shake things up around here - a reboot, if you will. We have plans in place that will make some changes to both the wiki's content and its community. You can take a look at some of the proposed changes below: Content pages As you might know, one of the bigger issues that the wiki faces at the moment is how to form a compromise between movie canon and novel canon. The majority of dinosaurs (Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Velociraptor, etc.), characters (Alan Grant, Ian Malcolm, Lewis Dodgson, etc.), and places or entities (Isla Nublar, InGen, etc.) exist in both canons, as well as in the expanded universe (games, comics, and the like.) Having separate articles of each dinosaur/character/entity for each canon would be relatively easy to navigate, but would be rather unwieldy and add many pages consisting of largely similar content. Conversely, having all the canon information on one article would mean that users would only have to go to one page in order to find what they were looking for, but the resulting articles would be messy, unorganized, and difficult to sort through. Thankfully, we have a solution! And the solution comes in the form of tabs. Tabs on articles will allow the information from multiple canons to be contained on one single page. You can see how they work on a previous revision of the Jurassic Park: Builder page: JP builder tab game.png|First tab Jp builder tab missions.png|Second tab These tabs are not created from the TabView code (although we did originally use TabView), but rather something called Tabber. Tabber is more effective than TabView for us because all the content can be edited from one page as well as displayed there. Due to the coding used, articles using Tabber can only be edited through source mode, but this shouldn't really be a problem for most users. With the inclusion of tabs, sorting and browsing information from the various canons is made a lot easier and more organized. A couple more notes on tabs: *The tab for Film Canon will likely be the first tab and as such the landing tab when you load the page. This is because most visitors will likely be looking for film canon information due to the popularity of the films. *Novel Canon would be the second tab, and is fairly self-explanatory. *Of course, there's also the games, comics, and toys to consider. This is a large and varied body of differing canons, and we're still working on how to place these into the main articles. It's possible that the Tabber feature may be able to be nested within tabs, and this would be helpful with organizing the expanded universe canons. *Depending on how popular the subject of the article is, a Media tab could be useful for displaying pictures and video clips that would otherwise have no place on the main article. Jurassic Park: The Game One anomaly in the canon to consider is Jurassic Park: The Game. It's a game released for the PC and various platforms, but it's also designed to fit in with the film canon as closely as possible. At the current time, it's probably best to include all JP:TG information in the film canon tab, and mark which information is specifically from the game. Dinosaurs The dinosaur pages are understandably some of our most popular articles, but they have a tendency to be inconsistent with each other. The wiki already has a project in place to standardize and improve these articles with the WikiaProject Dinopedia, and we're going to work on refining the project to ensure that each dinosaur article is well-organized and easy to navigate. In a sense, we're creating a Manual of Style for dinosaur articles. Here's a quick list of how the contents of a tab might be arranged: *An infobox with a picture of the dinosaur and some quick statistics (much like we have already), along with an introduction to the topic *How the dinosaur is portrayed in the canon - size, description, behavior, etc. The differences from the real animal are also important to include, but we shouldn't go too overboard with it, seeing as this is the Jurassic Park Wiki and not the Dinosaur Wiki. *The history of the dinosaur in the canon *If necessary, there can be a section for trivia and speculation. We wouldn't want this section littered with any old speculation, but rather speculation that is known or accepted by a wide audience in the Jurassic Park fandom. Examples: how in fact Metriacanthosaurus was probably supposed to be Yangchuanosaurus, why dinosaurs are colored differently between movies, etc. These statements should probably be sourced; for example, the Metriacanthosaurus/Yangchuanosaurus connection was affirmed by paleontologist Thomas Holtz, Jr. Jurassic World Obviously, Jurassic World has not yet been released in theaters, but it's the subject that everyone is interested in right now. Set photos, leaked details, and rumors spread like wildfire across the internet, and often it can be hard to tell what's real and what's not. Keeping this in mind, it is a necessity for Jurassic World information to be cited from a reliable source. This limits the spread of unsubstantiated rumors or speculation in the wiki. A logical question to ask next is: how do you determine the reliability of a source? Here are some examples of relaible and unreliable sources: *Colin Trevorrow, the director of the film, stated in his Twitter feed that Jurassic World would take place 22 years after the original film (in other words, 2015). Because this is information that comes directly from the production staff of the movie, this is a very reliable source, and can be put into the article as a fact about the film. *This article on BreatheCast reports that a fully-functioning dinosaur theme park will be in the film, as confirmed by many other sources, but goes on to state that the film will also feature a battle between Tyrannosaurus and Spinosaurus. The article does not give a source for this claim, and since the information has not been repeated by other outlets, this dinosaur battle should be considered nothing more than an unsubstantiated rumor until further evidence for it is discovered. *Pictures of a Jurassic World map have surfaced online, apparently from the set itself. The crew of the film have not yet made any comment about the map, but the pictures have been confirmed by a wide variety of news outlets and forums as legitimate, and the map itself has been seen on multiple different sets. Thus, it is almost certainly genuine. However, it is difficult to determine exact plot details from a single map, which might not even feature very prominently in the film. Because of this, be cautious in extrapolating details from the map into the plot section of the article. *A JoBlo article revealed that an anonymous source gave them plot details about the upcoming film. Among other things, the article revealed that visitors ride a high-speed ferry from Florida to get to the new park. In addition, they revealed that a hybrid dinosaur, created from genes of a T. rex, raptor, snake, and cuttlefish, would be the main antagonist of the film, and that other "good guy" dinosaurs trained by Chris Pratt's character fought against the "bad guy" hybrid. The news was reported by various other sites as legitimate. Because of this, the article would pass as a reliable source. **However, Colin Trevorrow later commented on the leak to clarify the information involved. He said that although a hybrid dinosaur features in the film, it was not nearly as monstrous as several outlets interpreted it to be. Though Chris Pratt's character is doing behavioral research on the raptors, they are not trained. Some information in the JoBlo article was also flat-out wrong, as Trevorrow stated the ferry to the park leaves from Costa Rica, as opposed to Florida. Comments from the production staff of the film are generally the most reliable sources you can get, thus in a sense "overriding" other sources. In this situation, the article should state that JoBlo reported certain details about the film (using the JoBlo article as a source), and those details were later clarified by Trevorrow (using Trevorrow's comments as a source). Also: there are some people out there who would like to remain spoiler-free about Jurassic World until it hits theaters. Because of this, we ask that you put the spoiler template atop pages and blog posts that concern the film, so people can avoid those pages if they so wish. Categories The wiki has also become littered with some fairly useless categories, such as those for years, "Dinosaurs of Continent", duplicate categories (there are two for Living characters, Minor characters, etc.), and many others. The common mistakes page lists some good reasons why these types of categories are a bad idea. We are working on creating an organized category tree to remove these unnecessary categories and improve existing ones. A great deal of work has already been done here, but there is still a lot to do. Pictures We've had some problems in the past regarding pictures - namely, images that are not from Jurassic Park media at all. If you're using an image to illustrate a page about a dinosaur, character, or otherwise, you'll need to make sure that it's from Jurassic Park media - primarily, depicting its appearance(s) in the franchise. There are a couple exceptions to this rule: *Images from production. These can be very valuable when used correctly. *On your userpage, you're generally free to use whatever images you like. Just don't go overboard with them, as we'd like to keep the wiki relatively free of images not related to Jurassic Park. *Sometimes finding a suitable image is impossible. Such is the case for articles with a subject from the novels, or a subject not well represented in the franchise. In these cases, fan-created images are allowed, provided they are reasonable and accurate to what is known or described, and are clearly noted as fanmade in the caption. Image copyright is also an issue. To prevent things from becoming too complicated, we will assume that using an image to illustrate a corresponding article on Park Pedia (hosted on servers in the United States by the non-profit Wikia, Inc) qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law. These and other guidelines will eventually be posted on an image policy page created by the admins. Forums Wiki policies, guidelines, etc. Category:Blog posts